A Starlet is reborn: It's little Sir Echo

Toyota's dull but dependable Starlet will make way for the mould-breaking Echo in September. It will be the first of a new breed of sophisticated, European-style small cars, and it is already making a big impact on the Continent, where Drive's BOB JENNING

24 June 1999

Toyota will lead the rush of stylish new-wave small cars in September when it replaces the bread-and-butter Starlet with the European-designed Echo, one of the company's key models for the next decade.

Known as the Echo in Australia and America, it will be the Vitz in Japan and the Yaris in Europe, where it went on sale in March to positive reviews. It will form the basis of a new range of models, including a mini people-mover.

Following hard on the Echo's September 28 launch in Australia will be Ford's radically shaped Ka and the new Hyundai Excel (possibly to be called the Accent). Holden's latest Barina should follow next year.

But don't expect them all to be arriving with a $13,990 price tag. Industry predictions are that with the introduction of these models, prices will creep upwards. Ford, in particular, is between a rock and a hard place with the Ka because it is sourced from Britain, meaning unfavourable exchange rates will make it one of the more expensive of the bunch.

Toyota Australia executives are negotiating hard with their Japanese counterparts over pricing, and the Echo is likely to hit the market with a bottom line of about $15,000 for the cheapest model. Other variations will be more expensive.

This is a major exercise for Toyota, which is building a new factory in the north of France to attack Fortress Europe from the inside.

The Echo's exterior was styled in Europe at Toyota's "European Office of Creation" (EPOC - they work as hard on the acronyms as anybody), while the interior was done in Japan, following European sketches. The Echo's exterior is tall (it is short, at 3.61 m long, but comparatively high, at 1.5 m), adopting the small-car design trend laid down by Mercedes-Benz with the A Class.

What this does is give the occupant an elevated seating position - effectively they're sitting in chairs rather than low-slung seats - and this means that their legs are hanging down rather than sticking out in front of them. It makes for easy entry and exit as well.

Toyota will shotgun the Australian market with a variety of models, all sourced from Japan. There will be three-door and five-door hatchbacks, both powered by a new twin-cam 1.3-litre engine, which introduces infinitely variable valve timing to Toyota small cars, providing strong low-speed torque as well as top-end performance. The all-alloy engine develops 55 kW of power and 123 Nm of torque.

And there will be a four-door "booted" sedan powered by a 1.5-litre engine which is, effectively, the internal combustion engine side of the hybrid electric Prius.

Even in style-conscious London, the Echo/Yaris turns heads. Toyota is pleased to point out that its biggest sales in Europe are coming from the even more style-conscious Italy, where 50,000 have been sold since its introduction in March.

The double take by a young woman in a new VW Golf as she threaded her way expertly through the traffic at Marble Arch said it all. A little further on there were plenty of opportunities for those famed surreptitious English glances as we sat in stalled traffic at Hammersmith for 45 minutes while someone figured out how to get the traffic around roadworks that had been going on for a week.

The Echo has a happy, humpy look about it, with buggy eyes and - in the cars we saw - either chrome-plated or matt-black punched-hole grilles.

With time to take in the surroundings, it was obvious that there is substance to the style. Among other things, the Japanese end of the design team had a brief to provide the maximum possible amount of internal storage space. So there are pockets everywhere - in the doors, in little caverns on either side of the facia binnacle, and in the under-and-over, twin-lidded glovebox. A total of 15 litres of storage, Toyota claims.

A novel feature is the way the split-fold rear seat can be slid fore and aft by 150 mm. This adjustment either gives more leg room in the back or more luggage space. The downside of the Echo is that there's not a huge amount of boot room, even with the back seat forward. If the seats are tilted, of course, there's more space for stuff, but you carry fewer people.

One of the most striking features of the Echo is the facia. Controversially, the instrument cluster is in a nacelle of its own on top of the centre of the dash - an arrangement first seen in Toyota models in the Prius.

In the European models there is a clever electronic display whereby the digital speedometer and the swept arc of the rev-counter give the illusion of being set deep in a dark tunnel. Cute, but we won't get it; at least not in the mainstream models. We will have a more orthodox - and cheaper to produce - display, although it will be still in the same dash-top, central location. It's well in the line of sight, and what it loses by being not directly in front of the driver it makes up for by being higher than conventional instrument displays.

Also on the British option list is satellite navigation and a trip computer. Dream about them, because it's unlikely they will be offered in Australia. What we will get is a sporty model, with an aero kit for the body and possibly a stiffening of the suspension.

The seats are pretty comfortable, which is just as well because driving in London these days - like Sydney - requires a fair amount of sitting around. We batted on to Surrey, wheeling our pair of cars into Brooklands, the first purpose-built motor racing circuit in the world, constructed in 1907. We sneaked a look at the famed concrete banking on which monsters - including the aircraft-engined Napier Railton - pounded around at 235 km/h in the hands of such operators as John Cobb.

Brooklands was also the home of the British aircraft industry, and it was here, during World War II, that the aeronautical genius Barnes Wallis developed the famed bouncing bomb, used to destroy German dams. Brooklands is now a museum, and many of its buildings have been preserved.

Vickers aircraft were built here and many workers have come back to roost. Our affable guide, Steve Devereux, turned out to be a retired aeronautical engineer who had known Wallis. He arrived in his new car - a Yaris, with which he seemed impressed, although he stumped the PR men when he asked for details on how, exactly, the variable valve timing worked.

Suffice to say it does. Our Brit-spec models had the 1-litre, 50kW engine, which was sufficient to keep up with the 130 km/h traffic on the British motorways and to deliver good snap, provided the driver was prepared to let the engine rev a little.

Although this is a smaller-capacity engine than the one we'll have in Australia, the characteristics should be similar. Maximum power is developed at 6,000 rpm and it spins up there with no effort. The engine was flexible enough, trundling along at low speed in a high gear, but for overtaking down-shifts and revs are needed.

Australia will get an automatic transmission version as well, but the manual shift is up to typical Toyota standards of lightness. We had power steering, which - like the power windows in the test car - will be standard in our top-level models and optional on others, as will be anti-skid brakes.

The ride is good for a small car and the handling is respectable. Suspension is by MacPherson struts with an anti-roll bar at the front and a space-saving torsion beam at the back. It handled the switch-backing, twisty little Pommy lanes pretty well. We're not talking sports car, but, given the predictable front-wheel drive understeer, there was reasonable steering accuracy and response. Finish is by Toyota, which says it all.

This is a car that is set to make an impact on the Australian market. Toyota knows that without keen pricing it can't make the 1,500 a month (18,000 a year) it wants to sell, so watch for it to be aggressively priced, but not in the no-profit end of the bargain basement.

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The size of your tyre is located on the sidewall of your tyre.It will be similar to the sample below.